The Pioneer of Kennewick’s Grape Juice Empire
How M.H. Church turned a home kitchen experiment into a national award-winning industry for Washington.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
California is rapidly acquiring a taste for Church’s grape juice, says M. H. Church, who returned Sunday from a trip to San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Kennewick product is becoming very popular this summer at several of the southern California seacoast resorts. The success of this man’s company has been almost phenomenal but in no sense accidental. Every advance step has been the result of carefully laid plans and ceaseless labor. When Mr. Church left Illinois eight years ago to build the first ice and cold storage plant in Kennewick, he was one of many seeking new homes, but four years ago, when he began, on his wife’s kitchen range, crude experiments with the blended juices of Concord and Worden grapes, he became a true industrial pioneer. Recognizing that the Columbia River slopes produced a grape of unsurpassed bouquet, he set out to reclaim the market for a Western product. His juice was recently awarded high honors at the Panama-Pacific and Panama-California Expositions.
“To extract the Columbia Valley’s aromatic sunshine from the grape and incorporate it in a healthful and invigorating beverage was comparatively an easy task.”
Long before Kennewick became a hub for scientific research and wine production, local entrepreneurs were fighting to keep the region's agricultural wealth from flowing exclusively into Eastern markets. This 1916 account highlights the origin of a local 'made-in-Washington' movement that set the stage for the modern Columbia Valley viticulture industry.
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